Episode 1 Review

October 8, 2014

Drifter Broken Road is a web series following Drifter, a nameless traveler who’s looking for the man who murdered her family. This series picks up a fictional future in which the United States as been destroyed by a second civil war. For all possibilities of a dystopian future for the self-proclaimed ‘the greatest country in the world,’ a second civil war is clever. Not only was the American Civil War brutally violent, but it also is plausible. The Civil War broke out, from my understanding, from trying to abolish slavery. Today there’s still events that show us deep rooted racism in specific parts of the country, and financial instability only adds to the problems between the classes. With these things in mind, it’s only appropriate that our main character is a woman of colour. What’s the point of telling a story like this only to have a white male show it to us? Drifter, our avenging traveler, gives us a voice over stating the situation of a country in despair. Through new characters and dialogue it’s easy to see that people have gone back to a time before cell phones and Internet banking. But the full automatic handguns and rifles that we know from 21st century America remain. This episode doesn’t focus too much on exposition, a huge strength, since is the mistake that too many shows make. This episode also follows the cinematography style of most westerns. Close-ups on the face and the handgun on the hip gives us a badass feeling of a showdown. Draw! Any sort of exposition we get from flashback scenes filling us in on Drifter’s backstory. It’s a packed eight minutes.